March 2011
News You Can Use
Midcontinent quakes: It's no fault of their own
Most of the world's earthquakes occur along the boundaries between Earth's constantly moving tectonic plates, like the San Andreas Fault in California. Small quakes along these faults are expected to occur relatively frequently, until they build up to the next big one. However, earthquakes that occur in the middle of continents, such as China's 2008 quake that killed around 70,000 people, seem to occur out of nowhere.
Now, new research from the University of Missouri suggests that inner-continental quakes such as China's may abide by a different set of rules than those that occur along plate boundaries.
Mian Liu, a geologist from the University of Missouri, and his team studied data from large earthquakes — 6.5 or higher on the Richter scale — that occurred in inner-continental China over the last 2,000 years. Surprisingly, they found that the same fault segment had never ruptured more than once. Instead, the earthquakes migrated throughout the region.
Divorced women do care for ex-spouses
Divorced women do care for their former spouses, offering support, assistance with daily tasks and management of health needs, says a new study."Some women reported caregiving as a turning point in relationships with their ex-husbands," said Teresa Cooney, study author and associate professor at the University of Missouri College of Human Environmental Sciences.
"We didn't expect to find this in a study of ex-wife caregivers. Several women noted that their ex-husbands had 'softened' during illness and there was less conflict."
From the Lab
Lucy Walked Tall, a Foot Bone Suggests
Lucy may well be the world’s most famous fossil hominid. She is the best-known specimen of the species Australopithecus afarensis, and her partial skeleton, found in 1974, revealed that she and her kin could walk upright.
Now, a fossilized foot bone from Hadar, Ethiopia, reveals that A. afarensis had arched feet, as do modern humans, and was fully committed to walking upright. The species lived between 3.7 million and 2.9 million years ago.
“One little tiny bone of the foot tells us a good, long story,” said Carol V. Ward, the study’s lead author and a biologist at the University of Missouri. “They couldn’t grab on to much, and they were walking just like we were.”
New Testing Could Replace Colonoscopies in the Future
Nobody enjoys colonoscopies, including mice. University of Missouri researchers are excited about the potential of using genetic biomarkers to predict colon cancer caused by inflammation. A new method developed at the MU Research Animal Diagnostic Laboratory (RADIL) could eventually lead to a method that might eliminate colonoscopies altogether.
While working to develop novel therapeutics for colon cancer, Craig Franklin, associate professor of veterinary pathobiology in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine; Aaron Ericsson, post-doctoral researcher at MU; Mike Lewis, assistant professor of veterinary medicine and surgery; Matt Myles, assistant professor of veterinary pathobiology and Lillian Maggio-Price, professor of comparative medicine at the University of Washington, found biomarkers in mouse feces that predicted inflammation-associated colon cancer. This is the same type of cancer associated with some common inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn's Disease.